Barry Lynn Friedberg MD

Dr. Barry L. Friedberg, MD, came to Palo Alto, California in 1975 to complete his formal education with an anesthesia residency at Stanford University, working with Cardiac transplant surgical pioneer Norman Shumway, MD. Following his residency and successful completion of his board certification examination, Dr. Friedberg was elected a diplomate of the American Board of Anesthesiology in 1980. He has made Southern California his home since 1980, working at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, CA, until 1991.

Hoag, Dr. Friedberg practiced the subspecialty of cardiac (open heart) anesthesia for five years until turning his professional attention to outpatient surgery for four years at Hoag’s James Irvine Surgicenter. Moving from an institutional outpatient setting to the office-based one was a natural growth in Dr. Friedberg’s career.

Since 1992, he has practiced exclusively in the subspecialty of office-based anesthesia for elective cosmetic surgery. Because of the unique challenges in the office-based setting, Dr. Friedberg saw a need for the education of his hospital-based colleagues who might choose a path similar to his own. Accordingly, he founded the Society for Office Anesthesiologists (SOFA) in 1996 that he merged in 1998 with the Society for Office-Based Anesthesia (SOBA), another non-profit, international society dedicated to improving patient safety through education.